She told me about
Emmett Till’s death from
The Afro-American, of another colored man buying the
farm. She warned me against the white women on Eutaw
Place; as she grew older the streets made her breathe
heavily, the winter slammed against her, boys played
radios all night next door, a neighbor died in the snow,
she prayed for the family of Emmett Till.

Sam Cornish’s 1935 is a memoir of growing up
black in Baltimore during the Depression and World War
II. Melding autobiography, poetry, and fiction, the
author, like John Dos Passos before him, creates a
collage of American experience which allows him to weave
twenty years of African-American family life into the
life of a nation. For Sam Cornish, a writer’s education
contains the radiance and terror of history.

* * * *
*

Contents

1935:
Tree in the Water 1

Children’s Books 75

Everlasting 99

The
Fifties: Part I 111

Southern
Interlude 135

The
Fifties: Part II 155

* * *
* *

Yellow Woman in the
Faded Dress

Cora: we carried her coffin from the
small room at the undertaker’s, and joined other members
of our little family. Cora Keyes, grandmother, was
buried in some field of wild grass and neglect after a
minister who barely knew her said a few words that could
have applied to many other women and not to her.

On that morning of heavy traffic, a
weekend, on North Avenue in Baltimore, the liquor stores
taking off the iron gratings that protected them during
the night, the coffee brewing in the drugstores and in
small greasy spoons, the children sitting on the steps,
free from school and waiting for mischief, we got into a
neighbor’s car and rove to the cemetery. She was a young
woman when the train was an “iron horse,” lights were
lit and brought to the table, spirits still roamed the
woods and dreams of the people who believed in them,
Jesus came to church all over the South when those
washed and cleaned in his blooded prayed with a free
heart.

In some places, the homes of the
whites where a telephone was a voice that came over the
miles of city block and road and street and sounded like
it was next door. She died with slavery in her memory,
and faced the twentieth century with the words of Paul
Lawrence Dunbar in her ears “They tread in the field
where honour calls, their voices sound through senate
halls/in majesty and power.” A poet of the people, in
his life as elegant as the generation that passed in her
times and as fair, and like those who recalled Booker T.
Washington, she looked, young and hopeful, into the
beginning of this century, now dead.

* * *
* *

The Way the Lawd
Intended

My mother lived a long life, and
although there were no jobs for her, her eyes failing,
her mind more confused than her mother’s when she
approached death, she fought for life through laugher.
Instead of making us sad or angry because life was not
fair, she made us laugh at her and through her, a sense
of the absurd, a high-school graduate earning ten
dollars a week cleaning up parlors and kitchens,
wrapping packages and stealing books for me.

My aunt made herself pretty once in
a while with a trip to the beauty parlor. Coming home,
hair shining on a dark winter night, like a cellar full
of coal, her hair still grew long and thick. She hid
dollars under the rugs, in pillows, coins in stockings
and in jars of rice. My mother, with her little hands,
peeled potatoes and sang a little, looking natural with
her hair washed and greased with Vasoline, listened to
the NBC Symphony, “Sleeping Beauty,” and the “Railroad
Hour.”

When she was a little girl, she would
sit in a swing somewhere in a backyard in West Virginia,
and thought of having a husband one day. She lived a
good life, she thought, in spite of the cops below the
windows, in the back rooms of grocery stores, sheltered
in the doorways against the rain and the dangerous
streets. She told me about Emmett Till’s death from
The Afro-American, of another colored man buying the
farm. She warned me against the white women on Eutaw
Place; as she grew older the streets made her breathe
heavily, the winter slammed against her, boys played
radios all night next door, a neighbor died in the snow,
she prayed for the family of Emmett Till.

* * *
* *

* * *
* *

Ethel
Broiled a Cat, The Meat Dripping

Negro
Collage

Good Ol’ Day
Ain’t Always

bad

jazz was
people and God’s hair

1943 (when
Hitler wasn’t so bad and the Jews

Were “those
people” in Toronto there was

Duke

Ellington
Day)

they used to
have pictures of Gary Cooper

as tall as
the theater Frank Sinatra

was a little
guy

this was the
day when chicks

were women

and necktie
parties were Southern

hospitality

stuff was
stuff,

& Stravinsky
listened to Duke Ellington

Fats Waller
played

at rent
parties Legs Diamond

& Dutch
Schultz killed

with
alcohol the mob sometimes
used

wood

alcohol
(wonder if that got my old man) this

was the day
of Cab

Calloway
Hidey-Ho

Lena Horne
at the Capitol Theater

Sophie
Tucker the last

of the red
hot (white) mamas

and
stockings were panty hose

stocking
caps

made Negro
singers

cool

* * *
* *

Sunday
Is Harlem: Street Corner Oratory

come home again

to the lindy,

the songs of Muddy

Waters

come

away from white man’s laws,

to the land

of

John Henry the poetry

of Paul Lawrence Dunbar

where the hands of Elizabeth

Cotton picks

freight train

freight train,

in the tireless modern

Negroes astonishing

Booker T. Washington

James Weldon Johnson

at the opera walking

strutting with a cane,

laughing

jiving

chasing trim

outraging

Zora Neale Hurston,

away from

the white citizens

council

sayings

never

never

never

never

come home

to the church

of Mother Horn

where Jesus peeks

sneaks

around

listens to the poems

of Frank O’Hara,

the smoky

voice of Billie Holiday

the Delta

of Muddy Waters,

to the tireless

and endless modern Negroes,

the Beat poets’

flat prose statements

lively as a Harlem

rent party,

troublesome

as three black

boys taking a piss

in the backyard

of a coffeehouse

where the young poet

is saying fuck

America

fuck you

because

he admires Allen Ginsberg

and every young Negro

poet looks at his street,

his home

Kerouac

Corso

and the poems

of Kaddish

clings

to his mother,

his deceased father,

come home

and the collection plate

is passed around

all afternoon,

Mother Horn

stands before

the door, come home

show Jesus

you love him,

tambourines,

tambourines, perhaps poems, about Negroes,

downtown misery

landlords & Jesus, the room

where you first read

Sterling Brown:

“strong men keep a coming.”

Margaret Walker:

Let a New
Earth Rise

* * *
* *

The Heart
That Breaks

Dwight D. Eisenhower

does not wish to legislate the heart

but it is the heart that ties the fan to the

body

of Emmett Till plunges it deep

into the river it is the heart that cries

out

Never

Never

Never

to the law

that rides

the Southern night

the heart that breaks

in the breast of the good men

of Tallahatchie

the heart

that writes

the letters

the thousands

sitting

in the meetings

of the white

citizen’s councils

the great

heart

for many ears

sweet

as an unspoken

word

whispered

in the dark

* * * *
*

Colored People Zora
Neale Hurston

Would Not Like

We met in the downtown public
library, prowling through volumes of The New York
Times Book Review and seeking titles that would
interest me, reading reviews with the same pleasure I
had once gotten from Batman. I loved Edmund Wilson and
Alfred Kazin and The New York Times Book Review
more than lunch in the cafeteria, where I would be
cutting afternoon class reading and looking around for
someone to tell me I should be in school. I noticed her
looking at me: two shabby Negroes in the newspaper room
among the old men sitting at the tables or leaning back
in the chairs with The Baltimore Sun or The
Jewish Times. There was nothing said.

Each of us looked like the kind of
Negro Zora Neale Hurston would not care to meet in front
of white people; the type the NAACP knew existed but
choose to ignore. We were beneath Rosa Parks and even
the cops overlooked us. She was wearing a long coat even
in springtime, beat-up clothes, runover shoes and
carrying her shopping bags. It was months later that we
talked a little. I was polite because my mother told me
to be. I was Jack to her and she was “Miss” and it was
“Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am.”

She told me she had published a few
poems and had even had a novel published through a
vanity press, but that a real publisher had expressed
interest in her work. She also said that she had taught
school and never married. I never asked why. Years
later, when my first poems were published she
congratulated me, but never showed me anything, she was
working on, although the book, she said, was coming
along.

* * * *
*

The South
Was Waiting in Baltimore

Ruth Brown

sang bad songs about her brown body but I

could see white boys hit the nigger streets

saw them running through the projects
looking

for colored girls

the Fifties were marching

integrating schools

young Richard Nixon

barbers standing

in the doors of their

shops saying

shame

shame

at the sight

of my hair

Negro men

scratched their heads burned

their hair

to make it

good

like Nat

King Cole

Emmett Till died

in Mississippi his

picture

in JET

Magazine

his death a word on the streets I never

went to Mississippi

during the bus boycotts

nor sat in

for civil rights

and hamburgers

I was poor even

then my shoes were holes

held together

by threats & good luck but I read Camus

& listened to Martin

Luther King

the Muslims

in the temple

selling

bean pie

& promising the death

of white devils

the white

man

that never came

in my room

the students

fucked I read

about Algeria &

found James Baldwin

disturbing

some of my friends

made jokes

about Mississippi

I never rode

The Freedom Bus

but I

walked the streets

of Baltimore

visited Little Italy

the Polish

neighborhoods

near the waterfronts

you did not

have to travel

to the Southern

states

it was waiting

in Baltimore

* * * *
*

Simple Times

we planted

cotton lives

on three
hundred acres of land

in the
country black and white

we picked

cotton for
our books

our clothes

one-room
school

until sixth
grade

then bused
to a training

school
(shades of Booker T.)

A Voice in
the Back of the Bus

walked

to town
where the sings

said
whites

and
colored and read

the papers

heard

As I read
about

Montgomery

and in 1954
the Supreme Court

decision
that

struck

down segregation

where Rosa
Parks would not give up her seat

that day
when the feet

of Rosa
Parks

would not
walk

to the back,

and she
would rise

from her
seat,

something
louder

than the
Supreme Court

spoke

to me

I heard Dr.
King

on a soul
station he was the Bible

speaking

in
Montgomery

a voice in
the back

of the bus

Later, whites would take their hands and sing “We
Shall Overcome” and the sun would set over the burning
city.

Sam Cornish operates as a whole person. He
hasn't chopped himself down into categories. the
fullness of spirit in his poems proves he has somehow
managed to survive clear and sane through the
everlasting maze of babble and brainwashed-print
blasting our sensibilities every moment everywhere.—Clarence Major

Sam Cornish lives in Boston, Massachusetts,
where he teaches literature and writing at Emerson
College, author of three books of poems, he is the
former Literature Director of the Massachusetts Council
on the Arts and Humanities. His book reviews have
appeared frequently in the Christian Monitor and
other periodicals.

I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.

Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.

According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.

Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.

As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.